Look up! What’s going on inside that plane flying overhead?
Planes fly high, so you can’t hear the screaming or glimpse a drugged face, bound limbs or gagged mouths as you might if someone tortured were whisked across borders by truck or train, so reminiscent of the rightfully decried Germans’ World War II Jewish deportations.
International law still matters in Europe. Western Europe, anyway. So there are some things Western Europe claims it won’t do. Like torturing, executing, and generally violating human rights. They used to, but after World War II, they saw things differently, and stopped. They made a very deliberate, conscious choice. And Europe claims it wants the rest of us to catch up. How they needle us.
But Eastern Europe — so far from America, and so close to the Middle East — has its uses, and America knows them well. America’s allegedly paying some countries handsomely for receiving and torturing “the enemy,” as US President George W. Bush generically and collectively calls Al-Qaeda members, Al-Qaeda copycats, Iraqi insurgents, and a curious combination of ranting imams, Virginia paintball players, and outspoken Floridian university professors.
If allegations are true, Eastern Europe’s also made a conscious choice, but one more in line with the post-World War II dictatorships and totalitarian societies they purportedly overthrew at the Cold War’s end.
And what conscious choice has America made? To claim the high ground of membership in the society of civilized states, while making sure to rent some low-end space in the still-uncivilized places?
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is evasive. But if it’s true that America sent its prisoners abroad by plane to be tortured elsewhere to avoid technical violations of torture prohibitions, then folks have made long trips for nothing.
Torture’s wrong, says the international community of “civilized” states. And how you get to where it’s not wrong matters.
The plane trips alone violate international laws, and there’s no gray area. The International Court of Justice at The Hague made this abundantly clear in 1986, when at the height of America’s “war” on communism and terrorism in Nicaragua, it ruled that US covert violations of Nicaragua’s air space and mining Nicaragua’s harbors to fight the “Sandinistas” — whom the US then described in terms very similar to those Bush now applies to Al-Qaeda members and insurgents — violated international law.
In the Nicaragua case, the International Court found that the UN’s concept of state sovereignty, that all UN member states are “sovereign equals,” extended “to the internal waters and territorial sea of every state and,” ultimately, “to the air space above its territory.” The court further held: “As to superjacent air space, the 1944 Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation (Art. 1) reproduces the established principle of the complete and exclusive sovereignty of a State over the air space above its territory. That convention, in conjunction with the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea, further specifies that the sovereignty of the coastal State extends to the territorial sea and to the air space above it, as does the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea adopted on 10 December 1982 . The Court has no doubt that these prescriptions of treaty-law merely respond to firmly established and longstanding tenets of customary international law.”
The law’s solid.
Look up. Is the plane flying overhead on a friendly mission? One in compliance with the precepts and rules sacred to your nation?
Flying over another state’s airspace without permission or in defiance of another state’s sovereignty is a classic act of war. And what if mistakes were made, and things happen? The issue’s arisen internationally in Cuba’s 1996 shooting down of the “Brothers to the Rescue” Cessna aircraft; the S.S. Vincennes’ 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655; the former Soviet Union’s 1983 attack on Korea Air Lines Flight 007; and the 1960 Gary Powers’ U-2 incident.
What America’s accused of doing today is more subtle, but no less wrong. The United States technically has permission to overfly European airspaces for various purposes, including commercial flights and matters of military defense.
But Europe’s commitment to banning torture, and the various legal instruments it’s enacted to this end, prohibit it from giving even tacit consent to use of its airspace for torture transport. Arguments the United States could make, and indeed, has made through Rice’s recent public statements on the matter — that America’s actions are helping to save European lives — are, absent European complicity, simply irrelevant. “Fighting terrorism” is often a good reason to push international law’s envelope, but the fight can’t be interminable, on all “fronts,” and can’t justify any and all means.
Look up! What’s going on inside that plane flying overhead? Heaven knows.
